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158587Re: [XP] Origins of user stories

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william.syntagm

Mar 25 4:14 AM

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Ron -

Many thanks (and to Bill Wake too) for your helpful comments. If anyone's interested - and the issue seems to have sparked some debate - I've been running workshops and webinars on the vexed issue of user-centred design in Agile for some years. You can see my article on this topic in Agile Record - https://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/articles/userreq21c.htm - or find out about the webinars at www.guerrillaucd.com.

Regards,

William Hudson
User Experience Strategist
Syntagm Ltd

--- In extremeprogramming@yahoogroups.com, Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries@...> wrote:
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> On Mar 24, 2013, at 8:51 AM, "william.syntagm" <william.hudson@...> wrote:
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> > I'm researching the origins of the term and concept 'user story'. The first mention in print is Kent Beck's Extreme Programming in 1999, but the first XP project started in 1996 (according to Wikipedia) but were stories a part of it? Where did they come from? The prevalent approach at the time was use cases.
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> > I have already done quite a bit of web searching on this so I'm not looking for Google hits<g>. Please let me know if you have some information that a web search wouldn't readily turn up.
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> I was on the first XP project, starting in 1996. We had "user stories" from the very beginning. AFAIK, Kent invented the term. We were all quite familiar with the notion of "use cases" at that time. User stories are not use cases. Alistair Cockburn called them "two bit" use cases, meaning the number of bits of information, not their price or value.
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> User stories -- perhaps better named as "customer stories" -- were unique in that they belonged to the XP "customer", analogous to the Scrum "Product Owner". They were far less formal than use cases, see for example the "Three C's" notion.
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> Bottom line they were there from the beginning and as far as I know Kent came up with the term. The idea of doing what one's customer wants had of course been around for a long long time.
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> Ron Jeffries
> www.XProgramming.com
> You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. -- William Blake
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> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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